Why can't Obama just do what's right?

What a classic Obama-in-government moment: the Pentagon announces that Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell is now history, but the Administration doggedly pursues legal challenges to stave off what it says it wants to happen.

So after twenty years of targeting and harassment of gays and lesbians in the armed forces and all the attendant human suffering it caused—not to mention the massive shooting-self-in-foot loss of valuable talents—the government we elected to stand up for this minority group against the gay-baiters is the last visible defender of antigay discrimination while the Pentagon signals that it no longer cares.

What makes no sense is the political ineptness of it all—the Democrats get tagged as the defenders of gays (and Hispanics and blacks and immigrants and unions and teachers and federal employees) anyway, but they refuse to show any gumption and actually take the side of any of these groups except in the most weaseling, half-hearted, limp-wristed way, ever ready to throw their erstwhile allies under the first passing bus.

Let us not forget that it was Clinton who first buckled on the issue and allowed the Pentagon brass to bulldoze him with the phony DADT ‘compromise’ in the first place, which turned out—just as many advocates predicted—to herald a new wave of anti-gay persecution in the ranks. Nonetheless, Clinton and his ambitious wife both convinced gay political groups to stick with them in promise of better days to come.

So 20 years later, this is the result: once society has so totally absorbed the idea that gays and lesbians really are part of the new landscape and pretty much fit in everywhere, including the armed forces, the political establishment, the Clintons, the Obamas, the official liberals, now with nothing to lose, may eventually accept the inevitable, kicking and screaming. This is the ‘leadership’ we have come to expect from Obama and his party.